Mistake is the wrong term. How about lie or manipulation? The fear mongering terms like WMD's and Al Qaeda were nothing put lies spewed forth to justify invading a country that Bush didn't like. The decision to invade Iraq came first....then the evidence to justify was manufactured later. Anybody who questions Bush's rational was immediately discredited and hung out to dry.

InfrasonicTom:Close2TheEdge: The Muthaship: Got rid of Saddam, and gave them a chance to have a country governed in whatever way the people want. Awful.

Which likely would have happened by itself without the cost of BILLIONS of dollars and THOUSANDS of lives.

Yes, it was awful.

You misspelled TRILLIONS

This still pisses me off. This was from Nicholas Kristoff's pre-war column, and he was relatively against the war:

But Mr. Bush has not overcome some practical concerns about an invasion. These concerns, which we need to focus on in the coming months, include:

...

4. Is the Iraqi desert the best place to spend $55 billion? Fighting a war will cost perhaps $35 billion, and it will take $20 billion more to rebuild Iraq. That's more than the federal government spends in a year on elementary and secondary education and health research combined.

jso2897:Also, there's the direct knowledge factor - I , for instance, got drafted in 1968. Nobody will ever be able to fool me that the Vietnam war was anything but a racket.

So what's skewing the numbers over time is that your generation is becoming fewer. I can't believe how low the number of people who think it was a mistake is, should be twice that if mathematically possible.

Liberals are basically the same pathetic outcasts they were back in high school. They watch the football team from afar as they wonder why they have no date to the prom. After years of hatred towards those who succeed they end up falling into a lifetime of trying to tear down their popular counterparts. It's so funny watching a rattletrap car with an Obama sticker spew smoke as it goes down the road being driven by a hog chainsmoking cigarettes while three or four shirtless kids fight in the back seat on the way to pick up their government cheese........Keep screaming and fighting the good fight, but trash will always be trash and the successful will remain that way despite how much you try to take their wealth. I know deep inside you want to be successful but sorry.....it's not in your DNA.

So we're back to popular opinion on major policy issues being important? Because after ObamaCare, you could have fooled me in to thinking that no matter what popular opinion was, it could be damned.

Mistakes were certainly made during the process and thankfully we didn't listen to Obama on the troop surge, but it's cool that he takes credit now for the victory the surge delivered. 25 million people are free and the world is a better place.

Tat'dGreaser:Saddam was an issue though in that region and we eventually would have had to deal with him but we rushed it way too soon and without a proper plan.

Not true, Saddam was actually a very secular tyrant and was a force against Islamist extremists in the region, Chances are actually pretty high that once the Arab Spring rolled around, Iraq would have naturally taken care of itself. And who knows, with so many dominoes falling it could have lit something bigger in Iran and that would have taken care of itself naturally.

MyKingdomForYourHorse:Not true, Saddam was actually a very secular tyrant and was a force against Islamist extremists in the region, Chances are actually pretty high that once the Arab Spring rolled around, Iraq would have naturally taken care of itself. And who knows, with so many dominoes falling it could have lit something bigger in Iran and that would have taken care of itself naturally.

Well in the realm of Team America World Police, he was a problem. Frankly we should just let them all just go at it.

thecpt:jso2897: Also, there's the direct knowledge factor - I , for instance, got drafted in 1968. Nobody will ever be able to fool me that the Vietnam war was anything but a racket.

So what's skewing the numbers over time is that your generation is becoming fewer. I can't believe how low the number of people who think it was a mistake is, should be twice that if mathematically possible.

What about quagmire? Remember how you were a traitor if you called it a quagmire? It was a textbook quagmire.

Remember Hans Blix was in pre-war Iraq looking for WMDs and wasn't finding any. But if your ideology says that the UN is a worthless organization, then it's only natural you would rather rely on intelligence from a carnival barker like Chilabi. The neocons wanted to go to take out Hussein long before 9-11. That's all there was to it.

rjkline:Liberals are basically the same pathetic outcasts they were back in high school. They watch the football team from afar as they wonder why they have no date to the prom. After years of hatred towards those who succeed they end up falling into a lifetime of trying to tear down their popular counterparts. It's so funny watching a rattletrap car with an Obama sticker spew smoke as it goes down the road being driven by a hog chainsmoking cigarettes while three or four shirtless kids fight in the back seat on the way to pick up their government cheese........Keep screaming and fighting the good fight, but trash will always be trash and the successful will remain that way despite how much you try to take their wealth. I know deep inside you want to be successful but sorry.....it's not in your DNA.

No Water, No Moon

When the nun Chiyono studied Zen under Bukko of Engaku she was unable to attain the fruits of meditation for a long time. At last one moonlit night she was carrying water in an old pail bound with bamboo. The bamboo broke and the bottom fell out of the pail, and at that moment Chiyono was set free! In commemoration, she wrote a poem: In this way and that I tried to save the old pail Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break Until at last the bottom fell out. No more water in the pail! No more moon in the water!

Bravo Two:Unfortunately, when you have people that control the sources of information, and feed bad intel to the president, the president isn't going to go out of his way to go around them and fact-check what his advisers are spouting. It's their job to, you know, get it right.

I recall that efforts to produce contradictory intelligence to the whole WMD thing were roundly dismissed by the administration. Was it Cheney or Bush that refused to see anything that showed Iraq to be a non-threat? Who really knows. In the end, between the WMD lie and the allusions to 9/11 support that were non-existent showed the administration was going in regardless of reason, logic or conscience. Tenet gets a medal for contributing to the fiasco, thousands of Americans die, tens of thousands have their lives destroyed and nearly one million Iraqis freed from their existence.

At this point, it would take a pretty big leap for me to believe Bush was fed bad intelligence and is this sort of child-like innocent in the fiasco. We went to war; we should not have--if it was because he was legitimately misinformed, that is still on him.

Terrydatroll:bulldg4life: Terrydatroll: If it was a mistake then it was a mistake by all of America. No one that I personally know was against it when it started and it was all but lauded by the entire country, even hard core democrats in Washington. Now after 10 years...sure..hindsight says we could have done more good by spending that money and effort in Afghanistan, but at the time it seemed the right thing to do. Second guessing it now is nothing more than self destruction. The problem with Iraq was that once it was started then it had to be finished regardless of the right/wrong of the war. Some wars a re justifiable, some are not, but they can all be classified as mistakes if examined closely enough.

Sure, other than the dozens and dozens of anti-war protests for the several months between September and March in the run up to the invasion.

You personally knew some goddamn idiots.

Either that or you were surrounded by idiots. I think the latter.

I wasn't surrounded by people that got swept up in jingoistic fervor and blindly believed the war was worth starting.

rjkline:Liberals are basically the same pathetic outcasts they were back in high school. They watch the football team from afar as they wonder why they have no date to the prom. After years of hatred towards those who succeed they end up falling into a lifetime of trying to tear down their popular counterparts. It's so funny watching a rattletrap car with an Obama sticker spew smoke as it goes down the road being driven by a hog chainsmoking cigarettes while three or four shirtless kids fight in the back seat on the way to pick up their government cheese........Keep screaming and fighting the good fight, but trash will always be trash and the successful will remain that way despite how much you try to take their wealth. I know deep inside you want to be successful but sorry.....it's not in your DNA.

There is no way this guy is actually a conservative. Which one of us 'liberals' created an alt?

rjkline:Liberals are basically the same pathetic outcasts they were back in high school. They watch the football team from afar as they wonder why they have no date to the prom. After years of hatred towards those who succeed they end up falling into a lifetime of trying to tear down their popular counterparts. It's so funny watching a rattletrap car with an Obama sticker spew smoke as it goes down the road being driven by a hog chainsmoking cigarettes while three or four shirtless kids fight in the back seat on the way to pick up their government cheese........Keep screaming and fighting the good fight, but trash will always be trash and the successful will remain that way despite how much you try to take their wealth. I know deep inside you want to be successful but sorry.....it's not in your DNA.

You're a goddamn troll and you deserve to live a sad, lonely life being ignored by those you desperately want to provoke a reaction out of. You got that from me today, never again.

/Or till you register under a different username//How sad IS you life, btw, that you have to resort to this?///favorited!

Egoy3k:There is no way this guy is actually a conservative. Which one of us 'liberals' created an alt?

Sadly, if this one is who I think he is, he's the only right-wing moron on Fark who's not a troll or an alt. The good news is he's also the only one who actually gets banned for his threadshiatting (over and over and over again).

Thats No Moose:rjkline: Liberals are basically the same pathetic outcasts they were back in high school. They watch the football team from afar as they wonder why they have no date to the prom. After years of hatred towards those who succeed they end up falling into a lifetime of trying to tear down their popular counterparts. It's so funny watching a rattletrap car with an Obama sticker spew smoke as it goes down the road being driven by a hog chainsmoking cigarettes while three or four shirtless kids fight in the back seat on the way to pick up their government cheese........Keep screaming and fighting the good fight, but trash will always be trash and the successful will remain that way despite how much you try to take their wealth. I know deep inside you want to be successful but sorry.....it's not in your DNA.

You're a goddamn troll and you deserve to live a sad, lonely life being ignored by those you desperately want to provoke a reaction out of. You got that from me today, never again.

/Or till you register under a different username//How sad IS you life, btw, that you have to resort to this?///favorited!

jso2897:I don't tell war stories, and I never will. Sorry to disappoint you.

definitely not asking for war stories, just why you don't think it was to stop the spread of communism. (seriously, every history book tries to say that. not saying you're wrong, just asking what kind of racket you think it was)

DamnYankees:InfrasonicTom: Close2TheEdge: The Muthaship: Got rid of Saddam, and gave them a chance to have a country governed in whatever way the people want. Awful.

Which likely would have happened by itself without the cost of BILLIONS of dollars and THOUSANDS of lives.

Yes, it was awful.

You misspelled TRILLIONS

This still pisses me off. This was from Nicholas Kristoff's pre-war column, and he was relatively against the war:

But Mr. Bush has not overcome some practical concerns about an invasion. These concerns, which we need to focus on in the coming months, include:

...

4. Is the Iraqi desert the best place to spend $55 billion? Fighting a war will cost perhaps $35 billion, and it will take $20 billion more to rebuild Iraq. That's more than the federal government spends in a year on elementary and secondary education and health research combined.

The other thing. These shiatheads that supported the nonsense in the first place, those think-tankers, opinionators and the like are still employed and considered serious people in the beltway. The ones that have issued their mea culpas? They've been sidelined and are now no longer in the club.

Lesson learned: eat the bullshiat and spew it forth without any critical thought. When said bullshiat is proved to be nothing more than the bullshiat it is, double down and stay in the club. If you admit you ate the mouthful of shiat and it was, indeed, shiat, you are a failure.

News: Poll numbers suddenly mean more than the facts. Poll numbers become what history chooses to regard as true facts instead of verifiable facts. Especially when the only released information to the public is a psy-op intended on letting everyone believe the RUSSIAN WMDs that were trucked out of Iraq (11 trucks to be exact) into Syria never happened. Either the Psy-op gets planted there were no RUSSIAN WMDs or we have end game of a thermo-nuclear war with Russia.

I piss my pants when I laugh to hard by mistake. I don't tell hundreds of lies over the course of a year and build a coalition of states to invade a country and get 10s of thousands of people killed by mistake. If you think that was a mistake, you are retarded and letting Bush off easy

thecpt:jso2897: I don't tell war stories, and I never will. Sorry to disappoint you.

definitely not asking for war stories, just why you don't think it was to stop the spread of communism. (seriously, every history book tries to say that. not saying you're wrong, just asking what kind of racket you think it was)

You seem to have very poor reading comprehension. I thought I made it clear that I perceive you as a troll, who is trying to draw me into a conversation that had already bored me to tears by the late 1960s.If you really believe in the veracity of meaningless strings of bullshiat like "stop the spread of communism", you are beyond any intellectual help I can provide you. I can recommend two things to you:1. Read "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler.2. Kindly have the good manners to f**k off, and leave me alone, as I have already made it clear that I wish you to do. I'm an old man who is tired of wars, and the lies that are told to trick people into them. Go pester somebody else.

Thunderpipes:Hitler didn't attack us either. Maybe we should have not gotten involved.

Liberals, imagine them in charge during WWII? Fark would be rallying behind Hitler, after all, he didn't like Jews either.

WWII was kind of like the mafia in New York back in the Twenties - sometimes the racket get s so big you can't stay out of it. Doesn't justify buying into it when you can avoid it. Has nothing to do with "liberals" or "conservatives" - actually, it was the right that wanted to sit out WWII.

Both political parties and the media are culpable in making the poor decision to invade Iraq.

I also believe that many intelligence agencies wanted to buy into Saddam's bluff that he was heading for nuclear and biological weapons. Many forces were pushing into a perfect storm and the train couldn't be stopped.

Hopefully, we have learned some lessons from the war, but our past history leads me to believe that this will happen over and over. Caesar needed a war for fame and fortune. There was no war, so he made one with the barbarian tribes in the north.

I also hope that there will be some benefit from the war. Arab spring? Counter to Iran? I know it will never be a wash and my heart goes out to the families directly impacted by the war. War is hell.